How can I achieve a Anime Shader look in Blender?
I specifically made a long playlist where the main characteristics of stylizing a shader play a big role in your character considering:

Vertex painting (to create specific shadows) use separate RGB to create filter for channels that can be later used as specular, reflective, etc. maps.
Using a threshold to limit the light (aka Ramp Shader)
Many math operations between results to ADD light or Multiply it (darken) in the shader editor.
Modeling in regards to how the normals will be affected by light. This is tangent and crucial.
You can copy &quot;simplified&quot; normals from less dense polygonal objects, since you want a very &quot;flat&quot; shading and not light-computed-accurate shaded models. Use the Edit Normals modifier.
Textures can also be used to create masks, so you can have flat colors but limited by black/white textures.
PLANNING a GOOD 2D CHARACTER REPRESENTATION is a MUST! You can't jump into 3D without proper knowledge of what makes your character look 2D.
Mask out any unwanted light shedding on the model. Use alphas in the image node textures.
You can watch more details about these points from simple to complex examples in this series for BLENDER ONLY &gt;&gt;
You can use occluding meshes to create fake shadows. Create a &quot;transparent material&quot; but shadows are opaque. You don't see the occluding material shader, but the shadows will be on top of whatever you want to cast shadows to.